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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • What is the actual plan?

    Navalny:

    I like the idea of anti-Putin voters going to the polling stations together at 12 noon, at noon against Putin.

    Well, what can they do? Will they close the polling stations at 12 noon? Will they organize an action in support of Putin at 10 a.m.? Will they register everyone who came at noon and put them on the list of unreliable people?

    It had long been clear the election would be neither free nor fair: Putin would be the only real candidate standing, with all his prominent critics either dead, imprisoned, in exile or struck off the ballot. But by simply showing up at the appointed hour, Russians could voice their disapproval and expose the vote — intended by the Kremlin to deliver the ultimate acclamation of Putin after his assault on Ukraine — as bogus.
















  • I’ll try to take a more nuanced and in depth look.

    As a start, I’m relatively sure the main use of a large chunk of agricultural land is solely food production. A cursory search gives data like this image
    global land use
    from this page.
    It’s reasonable to assume some of the plant waste of food crops feeds some of the livestock, but if that much land is exclusively used for animals it would seem reasonable we could at least double the human plant food production with a reduced animal portion in that land use.
    From a pure energy efficiency perspective animals are around 10%, so if you take half of produced plant calories and use them for animals, that will result in 10x fewer calories of animal products than the other half of the plants. This lines up with the energy spread by end human food product, which seems to be something like this:
    this is a shitty image link, that will probably break in the future. sry

    By the raw numbers and that coarse approach we expect 75% ⸱ 10% : 25% ≈ 1:3.3, the actual data seems to be slightly worse at 1:4.

    So it seems to me we are using something like 25% of the land area to produce 80% of the food, just by not passing it through animals. And if you are right then some of the animal calories are even supplemented with the plant waste of those 25%.

    The raw energy approach is actually quite a good approach by now, because we can use technology to transition most things into each other. You can pass plant waste into animals and loose 90% of the energy, or convert cellulose into (digestible) sugar and get the full energy. Or use it for other things that take energy like drug production. Using the plant waste on animals still brings that opportunity cost that means more land is used in other places to get the cellulose for those alternative uses, or to produce sugar the old fashioned way from more dedicated crops.

    Traditionally you had land that you could not use for agriculture but could use to graze goats, you had plant material you could not use for anything but feeding animals. Animals were our bioreactors to transform that material or land into usable products. Now we have better chains of use.

    The energy approach will finally be complete when we can turn plant material straight into animal products, with methods like lab grown meat or artificial milk, but we are not there yet. When we are, the energy balance of those should be close to that of plants and this entire problem simplifies greatly.


  • Hm, it seems you are right. Not sure how I didn’t know that.
    So is my understanding correct in that there are 3 groups of substances: vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids; that you would have a bad time without? Bringing the total to calories, vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, and water?

    In that case I suppose a minimum number of Livestock products are helpful in fulfilling that, though as the increase of supplemented products probably reduces the need, the amino acids can still be chemically synthesized, right?. The main criticism is also the amount, we are consuming (way) more livestock products than needed to fulfill nutritional requirements. Especially meat would still be optional, right?

    I don’t actually have experience with vegan diets, I’ve always figured eating little meat would get me most of the way with least of the effort.